REVIEW’S
Movie Review :
Udta Punjab
A
bhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab is littered with
standout scenes, but none matches the sledgehammer impact of the climax.Sudden, quick on
the draw and stunningly to the point, it brings the curtains down on a profane, dystopic vision of a state that
was once India's bread basket but is today burdened
with a whole slew of problems, not the least of which are
the horrific repercussions of narco-terror. Chaubey tells
his powerful, sinewy story with great dramatic flair, but
he never ventures too far away from the harsh reality
of the nexus between the drug kingpins and the state's
politicians.
In one scene, a lawman mockingly describes the current
situation as Green Revolution Part Two, drawing attention to the link between the drug menace and Punjab's
worsening agrarian crisis.If the film's keen sense of the
times that we live in is impressive, the way it etches out
and develops the key characters in the drama is no less
commendable. Three of the film's four principal characters are utterly imperfect, but they are, pretty much like
Punjab itself, not beyond redemption. When self-realization kicks in, they are all ready to give redemption a shot.
It is their journey from gloom to hope that Udta Punjab
tracks without the slightest concession to overt sentimentality. What it achieves in the process is real emotional traction. As the three flawed figures - a wayward
pop singer, a poor farm hand done in by desperation and
a cop uneasy with the compromises he makes - fight to
rise above the despair surrounding them, they emerge
as people worth rooting for. At two-and-a-half hours,
Udta Punjab is an overlong film, but almost every scene,
jointly written by Sudip Sharma and director Abhishek
Chaubey, demands attention and propels the story forward. The dialogues, mostly in Punjabi (written by Sudip Sharma), are earthy and rooted in the soil, which
augments the authenticity of the story and the charac-
30 | BOOM